and so it begins...

Welcome to talklock. I have begun to explore the world of cellphone voice encryption. Anyone who is interested in this topic, or would like to point to some information in this area, is welcome to comment here.

I don't want to start things out with too much rhetoric; let me just say that voice encryption is something that is a useful technology to many people. My main interest is our right to privacy. Anyone should be able to communicate over their cellphone without worrying about being listened to or recorded, or surveilled.

My initial current research has so far shown a company in Germany that cells encrypted voice software for phones. However, I do not know if it is phone-to-phone encryption, or depends on the carrier's 3G "secure" channel. I will post a link to the company I found, the domain name is on my development machine at home. For all I know, software is already available with source code somewhere on the net, but I have not found it.

In the meantime, I have a Java development environment set up on my old Toshiba laptop, with NetBeans and the Java Mobility Pack. I am able to build and run "MIDlets", small java programs that use the "mobile" subset of the java language, and pack them up to run on cellphones and embedded devices. I hope to write a MIDlet that will allow two phones to use OpenSSL to transmit voice back and forth, encrypted. There is a lot to consider: the phones have to find each other, there has to be an initial key handshake, I have to get audio data from the microphone and packetize it, on and on. The plan is to get the basic functionality, perhaps including a server to allow phones to find each other in layer 3 IP land, and then work on making the handshake and encryption very secure. I'll post updates.

Currently I'm staring at library calls in MIDlet land and trying to make them work. I have only written one Java program, it's taken about 2 weeks to get my head back into thinking java. No working code yet.